


Boys of Summer

by DarkAthena (seraphim_grace)



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Demonic Possession, Eichen | Echo House, Horror, Hurt Stiles, M/M, Mental Health Issues, POV Peter Hale, Present Tense, Psychological Horror, Psychologists & Psychiatrists, possession mistaken for mental health issues
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-28
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2019-10-18 09:01:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 12,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17577866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraphim_grace/pseuds/DarkAthena
Summary: Peter is a renowned child psychiatrist who worked at Eichen House and was glad to leave both it and Beacon Hills behind, but when Marin calls him back to work with a kid who for no apparent reason stabbed his classmate Peter is dragged back to face all that he left behind, in the hope that maybe he can help him.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DiscontentedWinter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiscontentedWinter/gifts).



> Void pushes and one of the way he does it is to talk about suicide so be warned, there is no non consensual sexual content in this fic, but Void pushes.
> 
> Also Valack needs mentioned as a warning because the guy likes drilling holes in people's heads
> 
> Happy Birthday Winter

  
The boy is sprawled across the bed at the back of the room, with his bare feet pressed against the grey green paint, halfway up the wall, and his head halfway down the plastic mattress. A bare metal toilet sits in the corner. Peter observes it all coolly through the plastic wall with it's circular holes. The boy doesn't react to him at all. He didn't even flick his eyes across to the sound of the metal folding chair being clunked down by the orderly.

Peter doesn't start the conversation straight away, he flicks through the file that Marin sent him when she asked for his help. He has time.

The boy is ignoring him anyway.

In his last school photo the boy is squirrel cheeked and plush lipped, with large golden eyes that catch the light like bright new pennies, and his hair is buzzed short to the scalp. He is wearing a tee shirt with the all seeing eye in white under a red plaid shirt worn almost through to threads in places. He has a beaming smile that invites people in. It's the most recent photo of him that has been taken.

Right now he's in the grey sweats that the hospital gives to all of its patients, with the green oak tree logo emblazoned on the breast. He's whistling a jaunty tune, it sounds familiar to Peter although he cannot say why. It nags at him with almost recognition, like it's on the tip of his tongue but he can't quite say what it is.

Sixteen years old and he's in the special ward in Eichen House; in a cell with a metal toilet and a plastic mattress and a pair of rubber soled slip on sneakers that he is not wearing and are lying beside the plastic partition.

Peter continues to read the file. He read it when it first came through-, when Marin had asked him for his aid. One of the photos is of the boy's back, and with the tip of his finger Peter traces the track of the lightning bolt that marks him, a lichtenberg figure with no reason for it to be there.

The tune is beginning to annoy Peter. He knows it but he can't quite place it. As he drove down from Sacramento he was playing the sort of banal driving album that his nephew buys him every year, in the hope that if he makes Peter think of driving he might take the journey more than once a year.

Beacon Hills is home but it's not where he wants to be. He's not wanted to be there for a long time now.

He loads the music onto his phone and plays them when he's driving, the sort of bland music that is perfect for letting his head go empty, occasionally a few verses to sing along, and he carries them in his head when he goes into his sister's house. Until the boy started whistling he had one worming into his ears.

He's had Don Henley stuck in his head for an hour but the boy's jaunty whistle is over riding it. He always liked that song. He remembers being a kid himself, with an old am radio tied to the handlebars of his bike as he cycled to school, and then later driving his mom's wood-pannelled oldsmobile, with the windows wound down and his backpack slung in the back seat as he sung along, hoping that the joy he felt in the song would go through the bars of the gate to the hospital.

*Nobody on the road  
Nobody on the beach  
I feel it in the air  
The summer's out of reach*

Even now he hears it and is immediately back to that time and place. Suddenly he is sixteen years old and Beacon Hills is his whole world, and he blinks and it is just a small place he can't wait to get back out of.

And in front of him, sprawled on the rubber mattress of a mental hospital whistling that damned familiar tune, is another sixteen year old boy who might be caught in that same dilemma of Beacon Hills being the largest place in the universe and a small stop to somewhere, anywhere, else.

The folder says to call him Stiles but his name is a Polish looking key-smash of consonants. He’s a contender for valedictorian. He plays lacrosse although he mostly warms the bench. His teachers have nothing but praise for him, he is as smart as a whip, they say, but easily distracted. Marin has scribbled ADHD in blue ballpoint on his notes next to recommendations for medications, it’s been scanned in and printed out. He was popular but not one of the popular kids. No significant other, but at sixteen who really expected that? One friend who came to visit him once a week when he was first admitted, but was asked not to come as he went first from the open ward to the closed ward; to the secure ward; to the special ward.

No one has discovered yet what it was that caused the boy to take a school issue scalpel to his lab partner in the middle of his biology class, stabbing her twice in the side before another boy pulled him off, pinning him to the floor until the teachers got control of him, waiting for the deputies to come and take him into custody.

He had no memory of it when he was asked why.

Peter has seen the photos of the damage he did to the girl. Marin included it in the file.

Peter shared breakfast with the boy’s father this morning. They shared a table in the local diner. The sheriff’s uniform was crumpled and his face looked more grey than Peter remembered it. He turned his cup around and around on the table. ‘"He liked her," he said, "he’s had a crush on her longer than anyone can remember, it’s not like him. I don’t know why," his knuckles whitened around the grey cup, so that the ink black coffee spilled over his hand, spreading in a khaki coloured stain over the melamine table. “It's not like him.”

Peter didn’t know what to tell him.

The official diagnosis, the first one Marin had given, the one signed off by Conrad Fenris, head of the hospital, was a psychotic break.

But he knows things, Marin told him.

And then there is the lichtenberg figure sprawling across the skin of his back that no one can say where it’s from, only that it is spreading. .

Peter wants to see if he can wait him out. He wants to see how long it can go before the boy talks. He always does this because it gives the kids he sees a measure of control. It tells them that they are in control of what they talk about, they start it and they can end it. When they have reached the stage this boy is at it’s often the only thing that they have any control over.

It must be fifteen minutes of the boy and his looping, happy little song, whistled softly as an amusement before the boy talks, he doesn’t introduce himself or address Peter, he simply says "My feet are cold,"

Peter has this sort of conversation with his niece, Cora, all the time they’re at home; she’s a similar age to the boy. "Your shoes are just there," he doesn’t look up from the file. The corridor is not cold, but there is a sort of balmy chill to the air from the air conditioning, and the heavy concrete walls feel a little damp.

The mountain ash in the walls makes the air feel like a duvet laid over Peter, dulling his senses.

"You could get me some socks," there is a smile to his voice as he speaks, a purr. Peter recognises it, the boy is being a brat because he thinks that Peter likes it, and then he turns his head, with those huge brown eyes and the soft plush mouth that looks like it deserves a thumb pulling it open. He pulls his legs down from where they’re stretched up against the wall and swings them to the floor, moving to sit in a gesture that looks a little too fluid to be natural. He rests his hands on his spread thighs and pushes his chest down with his shoulder blades pulled back before raising his head up. The motion seems odd; spidery- like his limbs aren’t quite fixed in place where they should be. His eyes are the colour of a cockroach.

"You know you can't have socks here," Peter says, "suicide risk and all," he shrugs it off but he watches, head down, eyes up, as the boy catalogues it. It looks like Peter's reading the file, but the page is open to the crime scene photos of a cave.

"I wonder who it was," the boy cracks his neck to one side and then the other. Peter makes an encouraging noise, letting him know that he can continue if he wishes to. "The one who stuffed a pair of socks so far down his throat that he suffocated."

Peter chews it over, the way he said it, that the thought was suffocation and not strangulation.

"Do you want to kill yourself?" Peter asks. He’s a psychiatrist, he has to ask these questions when the opportunity presents itself.

"I have cold feet," he answers with a quicksilver grin. It strikes Peter as ophidian, inhuman and cold.

There is another period of silence. It stretches between them like taffy; the strings of it pulling on and on until it eventually snaps.

Then something strange happens, the boy's posture softens, his back straightens, and his shoulders curl in on themselves the way a tall person does when they want to make themselves appear small. It's a behaviour people do when they lack the courage to make themselves large. He raises his thumb to his mouth, chewing at the nail in a way that tells Peter that the boy has anxieties, even if he hadn't read it in the file. Self deprecating Fenris had written, uses humour to deflect attention away from himself.

He knows things, Marin had said.

'Have you seen my dad?' the tone of the voice is different, softer, smaller. He looks much younger. He pulls his shoulders down into a hunch and ducks his head into the hollow they make. He pulls his thighs in from the aggressive vee that they made. He is completely altered from the lazy sprawl of bored insouciance to almost curled into the foetal position sat at the edge of the bed. His eyes have lost that bright cockroach brown and look almost in the changed posture, he chews on his lower lip.

"He's worried about you," Peter tells him, and it's honest. Noah Stilinski looked exhausted, grey skinned with sandy blonde hair going white. There were bags under his eyes and he had worried his napkin with a cold diligence that was the opposite of his son's manic energy. "He wants to understand why, we all do."

Peter makes a point of never lying to his patients, he tries not to lie in his daily life, but that resolution has taught him that the truth is never as simple as people choose to believe it is. It's easy to manipulate someone with the absolute truth. A well placed truth has more power than a hundred lies.

Stiles sits back and has a joker's grin that splits his face, "because I wanted to," he says and he takes on that strange sprawl. Suddenly spindle limbed again he spreads his legs and drags his hands up his inner thighs. "We were dissecting onions, can you believe it, all that potential, those wonderful devices, and it's onions we put under the microscope." He tilts his head, the angle looks almost painful to Peter, before he continues, "I wanted something more interesting to observe." His tongue flicks out like a snake's, tasting the air. "I wanted to see if she'd scream."

Peter is careful to give nothing away as he asks, "Did she?"

"You should hear Meredith," Stiles answers with that idiot grin, the one that never reaches his eyes which are cold and hard like pennies, "she could bring the house down." He pauses as he pushes his ass back on the bed so his back is against the wall, "they used to walk me past her in the tv common room and she'd scream and scream."

"What did you do to her?" Peter asks. Meredith was Peter's patient once, before he left Beacon Hills.

"Meredith, nothing," he sounds disappointed, "what did you do? She talks of you, in her quiet little way, such a quiet girl, and such a screamer."

Stiles is baiting him, but Peter isn't going to give him the pleasure of seeing him react. He lowers his head to his notes and starts scribbling, he can ask Marin about what happened in the common room.

"She's close to Brunski," Stiles says, "I saw them talking but who listens to me, I'm just the crazy kid who stabbed a girl in his class, what do I know?"

"What do you know?"

Stiles' laugh is cold and disjointed, it sounds like rocks falling over breaking glass. "I'm not that easy, doc," he says and starts whistling again.

The tune is jaunty and bounces around the concrete room and the plastic separating it from the corridor, and no matter how long Peter sits there Stiles does not acknowledge him other than that jaunty tune that seems to mock him.

 

Peter gets up from the chair and rearranges his notes, he's lost in thought as he walks down the corridor and so makes the mistake of reacting as one of the other patients calls his name when he knows better than to do so in this part of the hospital. "Hello, Peter," the patient says. He is a middle aged white man with brown hair and a dirty bandage wrapped around his forehead.

"Gabriel," Peter says, disgusted at himself. He knows better. Gabriel Valack is incredibly intelligent and very manipulative. He ran the hospital here until he took a black and decker power drill and carved a hole into the centre of his forehead. It came out afterwards he had been performing illegal trepannations on the special patients for years. "I can't say it's a pleasure." Peter was one of those who made sure that Dr Gabriel Valack vanished and appeared in the special ward instead of the system who wouldn't realise just how dangerous he was. He wore the same sort of ragged grey sweats that all the patients wore but he wore it, despite their grime and wear, with the same panache as he had worn ten thousand dollar suits.

"A trade, if you will, as one former colleague to another."

Peter should know better.

He does know better.

Yet he still engages with Valack.

"You must think me that same silly boy who came to work here before the ink on my qualifications was even dry," Peter had been so proud to get the job. Eichen House hired so few on site psychiatrists, and it was home, and after those years at college he had needed it more than he wanted. Gabriel Valack had looked to be everything that Peter had wanted to be in his immaculate blue pin stripe three piece. The art deco Spanish building of the entrance with the steps that led to the plaza flanked by the wings of the building had felt, that first time, like being part of history. The old and worn reception had been playing accoustic wordless versions of soft sad songs, so Peter had been humming Cyndi Lauper's Time after Time as Valack himself had walked him around the institution.

Peter's specialisation had been kids, teenagers who needed time or a place to be themselves, the lost and lonely youth that sometimes just needed someone.

When he learned Valack had hired him because of who he was, not what he was capable of, he was devastated.

Now he knew it made a terrible sense. Eichen had it's secrets and Gabriel Valack had used a Dremel Multitool cordless drill to core holes in his patients heads, and when that hadn't given him the answers he wanted he bored a hole into his own head.

Gabriel Valack was in the special ward because he needed to be. Outside its walls he was affable and charming, he was the perfect gentleman in his blue pinstripe three piece with his perfectly pressed white shirt and chirimen ties. He was a master manipulator. He could use his charm and his smile and his education to get people to do exactly what he wanted, and Peter knew that about him. He also knew that given the chance Valack would pull off the grimy bandage loosely wrapped around his forehead and urge people to look inside the hole. Peter didn't want to learn what it was that they saw there; but he knew the consequences well enough.

"Has it been so long?" Valack is up against the plastic divider, looking just as put together in his Eichen issue tee and grey sweats, he stands proud in the sort of plimsolls given to elementary school kids for gym.

"Not long enough," Peter growls and goes to walk past but Valack puts his hand against the wall.

"A trade," he says, he sounds desperate and Peter imagines he would be in his place. The protections down here are giving Peter a headache, a dull thump in his sinuses and behind his eyes. Sometimes he thinks he can feel the currents in the earth, swirling in a way that makes him nauseous. "Nothing you won't give, nothing to you," he's pleading. It's disturbing to see the man's facade crack in this way.

"Gabriel," Peter starts.

"Marin, she brings me books, but," he spreads his hand to show the pile, well worn and discarded, almost all of them have a shirtless Fabio clone on the cover holding some windswept maiden to his impressive cleavage. Peter can't resist the smirk when he sees them - he had not thought Marin could be so cruel. He thinks of her then, the quaver in her voice as she said "he knows things, Peter, things he shouldn't know."

"You want something else to read?" Peter is starting to feel sick, the mountain ash and the currents are starting to turn the headache into a migraine. He's been down here too long.

Valack shrugs, piecing his veneer of academic superiority back together. "I read them to the boy," he says, "I don't think he listens."

"You mentioned an exchange," Peter says, he wonders if he stands here long enough if he'll vomit.

"The song," Valack tells him, "it's Prokofiev, work out the value of that yourself." That said Valack finally moves away from the glass, sitting back on the bed and picking up one of the paperbacks from the floor. and Peter doesn't break into a run to leave the ward.  
Once outside he takes greedy gulps of air, air that's not sweet with powders, or heavy with the mountain ash in the walls, or the telluric currents swirling under the floor. He waits until he is back in his car, head against the leather steering wheel of his vintage Lotus Elan S2 that Talia calls his compensation, though for what he's not sure. He has the top up and turns on the radio loud and lets Derek's classic rock driving compilation fill the air so he can't hear that jaunty tune in his head any more.

Only when the headache is completely gone does he look up what Valack told him - searching through google on his iphone.

Sergei Prokofiev was a great composer of the twentieth century most famous for his composition "Peter and the Wolf".

Peter throws the phone onto the passenger side seat and winds the window down with angry jerks, cursing under his breath but he doesn't hear the speakers playing Imitation of Life by REM, he hears Marin's voice waver as she said in her message, "he knows things," then she paused, "things that no one should know, but he knows, Peter, he knows."


	2. Chapter 2

Peter pulls up at his sister's house just as the November sun sets behind the spruce trees of the preserve. The old gravel of the driveway gives off a pop pop sound like tiny gunshots under his tyres. He cuts out the radio as the singer maintains that surely this must be a dream, climbing out of the car and taking his bag from the passenger seat before he goes to the front door. There is a wind coming through the tree trunks to the small lawn that serves as border between house and forest. A loon gives out an eerie hoot in the settling night. He maintains that he isn't killing time. He loves his sister, he does, he's just honest enough with himself to admit he doesn't like her much.

The house is old, dating back to when Beacon Hills was first settled. It's a three story Victorian monstrosity of hidden passages and buried secrets. The annual whitewash does little to sway the locals from their determination that there is something odd about the house, ten miles from town and deep in the Preserve that the Hales keep wild and cover in no trespassing signs but do little to dissuade hikers or runners making their way through the trees, even if Talia does warn them it's private property and they should be careful not to get eaten, which she says with a loud snap of her teeth in a smile that's too wide to be inviting.

As long as there has been a town there have been Hales in the woods.

It's part of what suffocates Peter in this town. He feels like he'll be swallowed up, eaten by the Preserve and buried in a shallow grave in one of the secret basements in the house, arms crossed and wrapped in rope made from flowers. He's woken from that nightmare in his Seattle apartment more than once, choking like he might dislodge the dirt from his mouth.

He lets himself in, closing the door behind him, walks past the stairs to the kitchen where he pours himself coffee, trying not to feel offended when his nephew takes off like a scalded cat at the sight of him. "Hello to you too," he calls to his retreating back. The day has been exhausting and he doesn't need Derek's moods on top of it. The wallpaper around the back door is starting to peel which brings attention to the lines carved into the doorframe, a visual history of a hundred fifty years of Hales growth in the house. Every Hale born into this house has their height marked - Peter included. He wonders for a moment if the sheriff has one too - then drives out the thought.

His sister's Target coffeemaker means the coffee is burned and leaves a smoky aftertaste in the back of his throat. He keeps offering to get her one that won't offend what she calls his delicate sensibilities but she doesn't see the point - the one that she has works well enough for her. Derek's the only one who really drinks coffee anyway.

Peter wants to get the taste of Eichen House - desperation and disinfectant - out of his mouth. The cup he took from the tree is white but reads in black lettering "in my defence the moon was full and I was left unsupervised". It doesn't seem like something Derek would purchase for himself. Talia drinks tea from china cups with saucers and both of Derek's sisters live on soda and energy drinks. Coffee mugs would be Derek's and only his.

Peter drinks one cup of the too thin, too burned coffee before taking a seat at the breakfast bar and takes the Stilinski file from his bag to see if he can see a pattern here, when he hasn't before. He had hoped that talking to the boy would give him answers - he just has more questions. His laptop follows a few minutes later. He types faster than he writes and he wants to take notes.

Stiles Stilinski on the surface could be any kid in North California. He comes from a single parent family. His mother died when he was nine, and Marin's notes on the matter are vague. It seems he won't talk about her or uses the sort of epithets that would better suit Linda Blair. A quick google on the sheriff tells Peter that she died of illness in Beacon Hills Memorial. Her obituary is matter of fact, just that she was loved and leaves behind her husband and young son. He tries to remember her, reading that she attended Beacon Hills High at the same time he did but it's been too long and she clearly never did anything to make her stand out. Peter was like most teenage boys, a mix of hormones and narcissism so if Claudia Stilinski nee Gajos didn't make his blood sing he wouldn't have noticed. He remembered noticing Noah Stilinski, tall and golden, wearing a tank and those obscene shorts, long legged like a gazelle with eyes that fixed him in place. Eight years older than Peter and sure of himself and Peter had been in love, even if he hadn't known it as such at fourteen. He just knew he woke with a fever and the idea of him on his lips.

It shouldn't have been a surprise that Noah had run track. He had looked like he had been just waiting for the starting pistol to run straight out of Beacon Hills and ran straight into an army recruiter's office, trained up as a sniper, married a girl from his home town and retired to become deputy and sheriff. He still looks fine in a pair of khakis. Peter idly wonders how many of those votes he gets as sheriff are because of how fine he still looks in those pressed khakis but he remains steadfast to the memory of his wife.

It actually makes him more attractive: that kind of unwavering loyalty; even if it says more about him than her.

From the upstairs of the house Derek has decided to drown out his uncle's presence in the house with the clang of electric guitars. The Buzzcocks ask the evening "have you ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn't've fallen in love with?" and Peter is just glad that Derek's tastes turn more classic rock than his sisters' more eclectic tastes. He's not sure he could listen to Cora's music right now. There is a place for over-produced boy bands, but Peter's never been there.

Somewhere Peter had read about how the song had sounded like someone holding on to everything with one single frayed nerve.

He considers bringing a drink up to his nephew, wondering if Derek might spill on what's clearly bothering him if Peter makes an effort. Twenty two years old and he's exactly the same as he was at fourteen. Peter has other problems though. The coffee is thin and bitter, and the particulars of this case are eluding him.

A sixteen year old boy, for no reason anyone can tell, picks up a scalpel in his biology class and stabs his lab partner. As he is restrained he starts laughing. He is taken to Eichen House under a 72 hour psych hold and his father recuses himself from the case. Three days later Marin moves him from the open ward, where almost all of the kids in Eichen live, where he is under close observation to the closed ward because of threats made to and by the other patients. He has in that time had five visits to the "cold room", one of the old seclusion rooms where the walls are rubberised and there is no furniture. Eichen doesn't have the patients put there to "cool down", often with a shot of halperidol, stay there long, no more than a few hours and then under close surveillance.

He is moved from the secure ward within four days, despite that he has far less capacity for mischief there and there are, Peter counts them, six times when he had to be secured and returned to his room. For his own safety Fenris, a doctor Peter only knows by reputation and doesn't think much of, moves him to the secure ward. He is there for one day before he attacks one of the orderlies who is trying to subdue him, uses the syringe on the orderly and returns to his cell whistling. It is agreed that he will be moved to the special ward.

The special ward is for patients that the hospital wants forgotten; those that need to be kept secure and restrained, and will almost certainly never be released.

In just over four weeks he has vanished into the bowels of the hospital.

Marin has no idea what to do with him and so called in all of her favours with Peter. Peter has often considered her, and fairly, to be too sentimental for this kind of work. She cares and that is what will destroy her. One of these kids will break her heart and it will be the final straw heaped on the back of a camel whose work is dealing with kids that will break your heart.

He looks at his notes as he drains the unpleasant coffee from the mug.

Pierrotique is the word he has used to describe the boy, but then there is that one moment, that fragment of time when he softened, when he drew in on himself and looked like another person. Then the arachnid clown returned, the one that whistled Prokofiev and lay with his legs, the same long legs as his father, up the wall.

Peter then stares at the screen as he tries to decide if pierrotique is a word.

Derek has changed the track, from above a British gravel travels down,   
"We screwed up for too long  
I don't want to lean on the waves  
I watched the storm evaporate  
I think of you and starry skies  
That keeps you so alive"

It sounds modern. In fact Peter thinks he might have seen it performed this summer on the television. He'd have to check. It is weird though, normally Derek considers artists like John Mellencamp modern. Peter could have sworn that Derek hasn't liked a song released in the last ten years. It's not earth changing but it is off, and sometimes a word when someone is off is all that they need before it gets much worse. Maybe Derek hadn't scuttled off like a cockroach with the lights turned on - maybe he had just wanted Peter to follow him.

Peter saves the document with his notes before he gets up and is debating bringing Derek a coffee when Cora comes in through the back door. She immediately goes to the fridge and takes out a cherry Coke undoing all of the good work the run that she was on achieved.

Peter is always surprised by how little that Cora appears to change in his absence - Derek had grown in fits and spurts so it seemed like he could go to bed and wake up a foot taller, in contrast his sisters went through puberty slowly, seeming to slow plump up into womanhood with mood swings and clothes that seemed to get smaller and tighter. "Hey, uncle P," she says it ike it's not unusual that be be there, as if he lives in the house and not two states away.

"Apple," he's called her that since she was a baby, and her protestations that it's not her name have always been a little token. Most of the time she doesn't even bother to complain. They have always acted like it's not been any time since they passed, as if the last time he saw her was this morning. "Any idea what's going on with your brother?" He asks her.

Cora pulls a face, "you mean other than being Derek?" she snorts out a laugh that swings her ponytail, and Peter can only answer fair. "His birthday is next week," she said pulling out one of the kitchen chairs and sitting down with her soda, "and I have no idea what to get him."

"I got him noise cancelling headphones," Peter tells her. He hasn't but as soon as she's gone he is so going to order a pair so it looks like he planned it all along. He had completely forgotten Derek's birthday.  
  
"Ugh, his taste in music is the worst," Cora complains and then notices the files and laptop on the table spread out in front of her uncle, which she tries to surreptitiously read - however she is not subtle and he closes the laptop with a snap. She pretends that she was never interested but she clearly saw something, "so, are you here to medicate Beacon Hill's own serial killer in training?"

"You watch too much bad TV," he says, "but yes, I've been called in by Eichen House to help with a patient," he runs the numbers in his head, "you might be able to help," he says, "you do go to the same school." Cora looks delighted and mutters an I knew it. "Do you know Stiles Stilinski?"

"He's in my grade," she says it like an evasion as if she thinks she can get it past him, as if he doesn't deal with teenagers doing the exact same thing every day. "I mean is it true?"

"Depends on what you've heard, there's a lot I can't tell you, but I can tell you some things." That is true, he can tell her things that are common knowledge, things that were released to the press but it might be more than she knows - on the other hand she goes to the school and knows both Stiles and the girl he stabbed, however weakly, and there are things she might know that no one thinks to ask.

"Do you know why he did it, I mean went full on crazy-pants?"

"Apple," he corrects her, "we don't use that kind of language," he's firm with that. "You don't get to act superior because someone is ill," it's the one thing he has been adamant on with all of the kids he works with - they're not crazy they're sick and sick can be treated. He doesn't see why Cora should be exempted just because she's related to him.

Cora decides to ignore him, "I heard," she starts, "that after bringing out a knife and stabbing Lydia he fell on the floor and started talking in tongues, right there in the chem lab."

"Well that's mostly nonsense," Peter corrects her, lifting his cup and notices that it's empty and puts it back down. "It was in the bio lab, it was a school issue scalpel and he was tackled by the lacrosse team." He frowns at the cup as if it will spontaneously refill itself if he stares at it long enough. It doesn't. "What have you got for me, I've got the grown up version, the teacher,"

"Ms Finch," Cora says, "she teaches bio," there is a pause, "she's a bitch, she seems really strict but if anything happens she freezes, she knows her stuff, but she doesn't always get it across." Peter quirks an eyebrow at her. "I don't take bio," she admitted, "Finch just rubs me the wrong way, I don't know why."

Peter resolves to try to talk to the woman. "And," he presses, with Cora it's better to trade information than just press her. She'll clam up if she thinks you're trying to force her into anything and she will not be moved.

"Okay, I'm not in this class but I heard this," she started to chew on her lip- like she was breaking a confidence, "he had a thing in   
Mr Yukimura's class, Stiles I mean, I only know him because he takes music, he plays the guitar and sometimes we pass in the hall with him coming in as I'm leaving, I know him to say hi, and that's it." She seems determined to have him believe her so it might be true, he can check the details with the sheriff, "and I'm not in his class for history, I've got Tharpe, but Mr Yukimura called on him, Stiles I mean, to read at the front of the class and Sidney, she told me this, she said it looked like he was going to be sick and ran into the boys toilets, his friend, Scott, he went in after him and then told Yukimura that he had to take Stiles to the nurse's office because he had a panic attack."

Peter scribbles it down into his notebook. "See, that's the sort of thing I can't get from a file," Peter tells her. "Can you think of anything else?, it might not seem important, it can be something small."

Cora is quiet for a moment as she thinks, chewing on her lip as she does so, and the silence is broken by the thump and wail of Derek's music. "I don't really know him, uncle P, so unless it's gossip worthy I just haven't heard it."

He gives her a smile that suggests it was worth a try, "you keep your ear to the ground for me, 'kay, Apple."

"Have you spoken to Lydia?" she asks, "her and Scott, they see him the most." She stands up, "I'm going to go have a shower, I stink after my run, will you make lasagna for supper?"

He flicks his eyes to the clock before he agrees. She's halfway to the back stairs when Derek changes the song, pumping up the volume as if he thinks he's alone in the house with no one to complain. Peter knows the song.

"sucker love is heaven sent,

you pucker up our passion spent,

my heart's a tart your body is rent,

my body's broken, yours is spent.

Carve your name into my arm,

instead of stressed I lie here charmed,

because there's nothing else to do,

every me and every you."

"Apple, are you sure there is nothing going on with your brother?" Peter asks.

"Dunno," she answers, "I figure he got dumped, he just locks himself in his room, listens to music and stares at his phone," she gave a shrug like "what can you do?" before she continued up the stairs. Whatever it was that was bothering Derek he had found a coping strategy and it sounded like his taste in music might have improved.

 


	3. Chapter 3

 Peter has to wait three days before he can go back to Eichen to interview his patient. Not long after Peter left the first time Stiles attacked one of the orderlies taking him to the showers. He bit his finger clean off. Stiles spent the next two days in a medicated fugue. When asked why, with the blood still wet around his mouth and eyes gleaming, he answered - “he has to learn not to touch; to look with his eyes and not with his hands.”

Marin’s terrified call, her voice wavering in the pre-dawn light like she might want to cry but had been holding it back with every part of her, had added that Schrader, the orderly, was now on administrative leave pending accusations made by the patients. Eichen would pay for his medical expenses then he was being let go. “He knows things, Peter, and it scares the shit out of me, there’s no way he can know these things, but he does, and he’s always right.”

It gives Peter time to investigate before he goes back to Eichen House; before he goes back into the quiet damp feel of the basement and the light from the flickering naked bulbs that give him a migraine. He always showers after he leaves, like he can scrub the antiseptic misery of the place from his skin if the water is just hot enough.

He meets the biology teacher, Ms Finch, in the school parking lot when he goes to pick up Cora. They share a frisson but neither mentions it. It makes her wary of him. She’s a slim woman with light brown hair and a look of Carrie Fisher about her. She is wearing a light blue blouse and fitted pants with leather flats. “I’m Peter Hale,” he introduces himself, “Cora’s uncle, I was wondering if we could talk.”

“I don’t teach her,” she says brusquely and goes to leave.

“No, but you do, did, teach Stiles Stilinski,” he says, trying to soften her gaze with his most charming smile, “I’m his psychiatrist and I was hoping you could help.” He had expected something in her reaction, perhaps a softening, a gesture of shared governorship of his future but there is nothing.

“I’ve told the police everything I know.” She shuts him off, closing herself up like a fan.

Peter’s smile now slithers across his face and he tilts his head, “I don’t think that’s true, now, do you,” he answers knowing she recognized the frisson as well as he did. Shared moments like that are not easily forgotten. “I don’t judge, Ms Finch,” he says, “but I can’t help him if I don’t know everything,” he drags his tongue over the syllables. “Perhaps we could meet,” he pauses, “for coffee,” he adds, “somewhere where we can spend time talking,” he makes it sound less like a threat although really he has nothing he can hurt her with. “One caregiver to another, for a kid who might otherwise never leave the system, as fellow members of the _community_.” He puts a special emphasis on that word.

“I have,” she starts but he cuts her off crisply.

“Don’t we all,” he shrugs her off, “is Saturday good for you? noon? We can go to that lovely little coffee shop on Maple, the one with the cro-nuts, I’ll get a table.” And then without waiting for her to deny him he walks over to Cora. He knows she’ll attend; he knows too much for her not to. He knows why Marin finds Stiles so terrifying, why his knowing scares her so much, because of the power it gives over people - it’s electrifying. The arrangement is safer for both of them, public, open space, enough that neither feels cornered. She probably won't tell him anything but he's floundering in the dark and you never know.

Lydia Martin is talking to Cora, a plump little peach of teenager with light red hair she wears in a Russian braid, a crown about her head to remind everyone around her that she is their queen. She wears a light floaty black dress with red flowers and a short jean jacket. Her heels make her seem less tiny but she can't be more than five foot without them. She's going to be beautiful when she's older, and attract admirers by the dozen, but for now she's seventeen and lord of all that she surveys. Girls like that are dangerous, Peter thinks, they either marry their childhood sweethearts, have a bushel of kids and coast on past glories as they slowly become more bitter of what could have been, or they leave their childhood behind and crush all opposition to their goal. Peter thinks with this girl it'll be the latter. Over her perfume, which he recognizes as Miss Dior, bringing to mind a pleasant weekend with a girl years before who had laughed as she sprayed her sheets with it, there is a tang of ozone, like the air just before a thunder storm. This girl, given the chance, would rule the world.

So why did her classmate take up a scalpel and drive it into her intercostal muscles between the fourth and fifth rib on the left side. Had the knife been any longer, or even anything other than a blunt high school scalpel used for slicing up generation after generation of onions, he could have killed her with that blow. 

It's a puzzle. 

Peter has never liked those.

He is too much of a perfectionist, he has to solve the problem or he can't function and right now Stiles Stilinski is a part of a puzzle piece and he can't help but think of the way that he changed, the way that he had curled in on himself, rocking and asked "have you seen my dad?" like he was a different person.

"Ugh," Cora says when she sees him, and rolling her eyes and sighing she goes to introduce him, "Lydia, this is my uncle, he's the one I told you about, the shrink."

"Apple," Peter uses the nickname in front of her peers as a rebuke and she knows it because the skin around her eyes tightens, "I'm a psychiatrist, I work with teenagers who need more support than others."

"You're the fancy doctor that they called in from out of state," she says it bluntly, her voice has a pleasant gravel to it, if she was older he'd do more than flirt but she's seventeen. It all begins and ends there.

"At your service," he says with a mock bow of the head.

She looks him up and down; taking his measure from his Italian leather oxfords to his cashmere sweater with the v neck. She puts mental price tags on everything and then her smile becomes sharper, more conniving because she has the measure of him and she knows what he likes. She's astute, because she is right. It's her intelligence not her frame that would trap a man like Peter, and maybe in six months he might take her for a spin. Somewhere in the parking lot a teenager starts his car and there is a blare of music, amidst the engine sounds and the electric guitars Thom Yorke sings "You're just like an angel; Your skin makes me cry" before the car pulls out and away, the lingering echo of the song and the words "I don't belong here".

If Lydia notices she gives no outward show of it. She wears her popularity like armor. Peter can respect that about her.

He doesn't get a chance for more than that before a red haired woman comes dashing across the car-park in what is not quite, but almost, a run. She must be Lydia's mother. Cora had said that she had taken over for Harris whilst he was "missing" which was the term the faculty used and caused the rumor mill to go wild. People leave Beacon Hills all the time, Peter knows, often as fast as they can without worrying about things like students and what rumors they leave in their wake. Adrian Harris probably left because his taste for younger women was causing a stink that even Peter was aware of. None of them were underage, or under twenty one, but the older he got the more noticeable it got, and the more people commented that he taught at the high school with a worried tightness of their lips.

"Excuse me," she says in that specific tone of voice Peter associates with "Can I speak to your supervisor" in stores. 

"Hi," he offers her his hand like he's not a grown man in a school car park, "I don't think we've met, I'm Cora's uncle, I'm here to pick her up."

All of the woman's righteous indignation catches, he can see the amount of moments it takes her to change track, "you shouldn't be here, this is," it's then she realises he's on the public walkway outside the carpark, as Lydia groans, "mom," and rolls her eyes.

"Cora was just telling your daughter?" he guesses although he knows pretty well who she is, "that I'm the doctor who came in from out of town in regards to her being attacked," he doesn't need Lydia's mother to be on board, but it would certainly be simpler. It appears that that was the wrong thing to say because that righteous indignation comes back and her lips tighten and her neck turns red. It's a pity, she's an attractive woman and that kind of frowning just makes her look older. She reaches out and grabs Lydia's arm and goes to pull her away but Lydia jerks free from her grasp.

"I'd love to help you, Dr Hale, Stiles was the only student here who is even close to being smart enough to give me a challenge for Valedictorian, there's no fun in the race if you're the only one in the running," She doesn't look to be bragging when she says this although her tone tells him otherwise. Cora has said before that Lydia pretends to be dumb and she has certainly sized Peter up as soon as meeting him. "I've been reading, on psychotic breaks," she licks her lips, "to see if I could understand."

"These things rarely make sense to anyone but the sufferer," Peter tells her and it's honest. He is known for not lying but he's not mollifying her, he doesn't think she would appreciate it.

"Yeah," she says, "but maybe this will help, before he," she stops and her hand goes to her side. She is probably still wearing a bandage to protect the wound, "he said, and," she pauses again. " _Die Todten reiten schnell._ " He sees her armor waver for just a moment before she reasserts her bubbly facade of vacuity. "and then after, when he started laughing, he said, _Laß sie ruhn, die Todten_. I hope that helps. Mom," she turns to her mother, "are you coming?"

Peter rolls the words around in his mind, pondering them, it's German and there are bits he recognises, of course, but he's going to have to look it up. " _Die Todten reiten schnell._ " He repeats. He's heard it somewhere before. "Apple, do you fancy In'n'Out, I'm paying." 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We have notes on this chapter  
> 1\. Schrader is the name of the creepy orderly in season 5 and 6, who becomes the hunter in 6b. He's not an OC but an actual creepy character  
> 2\. The German is from the poem Lenore by Gottfried Buerger but if it sounds familiar it's because it's on the grave in the unpublished third person first chapter of Dracula by Bram Stoker, which was published as Dracula's Guest  
> no vampires but appropriate enough


	4. Chapter 4

Peter is perched on the railing of the family porch smoking. It’s a filthy habit and he hates it but he’s reached the stage where he really needs a cigarette. He pulls it from a packet that must have been six months in the glove compartment of his car and looks like the kids at Beacon Hills High have used it for lacrosse practise. He puts it to his lips, lights it with an old Zippo given to him by a patient who liked to light it as a stim as thanks for giving him a safer way to express himself in public and takes that first draw. As always it tastes of camel shit and tar and death but the ritual has its own purpose. People still use the curls of smoke from incense to carry their prayers to heaven. Do people pray on cigarettes, on the puff of smoke from his lungs and the thread of it from the glowing ember at it’s tip? 

From an open upstairs window music trails down, twisting through the smoke to the porch where Peter just wants to clear his head, a soft male voice, smoky with laughter and the plink of an acoustic guitar,  “ So remember we were driving, driving in your car,  Speed so fast I felt like I was drunk,  City lights lay out before us  And your arm felt nice wrapped 'round my shoulder  I had a feeling that I belonged  I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone” and then laughter, soft and warm and the window closes with a muted thump.

So Derek has a boyfriend, he thinks, and he wants to keep it secret. Peter doesn’t care, Derek’s life is his own to live and that person is the one who brings him the music. With his mind idling he wonders what kind of man Derek likes. Derek who needs praise like air but would never admit it and pretends to be gruff so no one can see that a man who looks like that is so painfully shy. He would drive everyone away rather than admit that he is weak. Considering the women that he lives with Peter isn’t surprised, Talia, Laura and Cora have no real weaknesses, and Derek is the lowest in the pecking order, a glorified house elf who maintains the house for his Mayor mom and firefighter sister, with Derek in college he’s the one with the most time. Time enough to find a lover, Peter thinks, but he goes quiet when Derek opens the back door and starts, seeing Peter there.

He’s dressed for a run, basketball shorts and an under-armor tee, a water bottle in his running belt and battered sneakers, he has his phone strapped to his arm and one ear bud hanging around his neck playing music in tinny reverb that Peter can’t make out.

“I never understood how you could do that,” he gestures to the cigarette, “foul things.”

“I agree,” Peter says, taking another drag, “but it’s,” he gestures with it. “Your mom does it too, when we were kids everyone smoked, I mean everyone, and it was just something you did to fit in, and when you’re a kid all you want to do is fit in, your mom used to smoke these French things, foul things like old rubber and tar in a pink paper, it was like sucking straight off an airplane’s exhaust.” He pauses, thinking, “personally I think if you’re going to do it you might as well go for the nastiest one, like shredded camel shit and old creosote,” he shrugs, “you don’t do it for the taste.”

“Then why do you?” Derek asks. Derek could make a wonderful psychologist Peter thinks, he has a talent for asking the right questions but lacks the basic narcissism necessary, Peter rebuilds kids from the ground up and he enjoys it, Derek’s soft heart would break for each of the kids he can’t save. 

“Because,” Peter says, “it’s five, ten minutes where my mind has nothing else to do, it’s the closest I come to meditation, I take out coffee and there’s always someone wanting something or something I have to do, and the coffee gets cold and I don’t get the chance to just think,” he stops, “you go out with a cigarette and no one bothers you, even your own mind. Smoke at your desk and you just get ash and burned fingers, but like this, it’s like scraping your mind clean, just for a couple of minutes. It’s like it burns away everything and leaves, but that’s the meditation not the cigarette, but when you spend years doing it,” he’s not quite babbling, he’s trying to explain something to someone who has never needed this the way that he has, who is not wrestling with the problem of a seventeen year old boy looking to spend his life in the special ward of Eichen House unless Peter can solve the riddle he presents. There is a way into his special brand of madness and with the right lever one can move the very world. Peter just needs to find that lever.

“Short answer,” he says, “it helps me think.”

Derek huffs an answer, “let me know if you come up with a solution,” he says, finished his stretching and goes to run.

“You can talk to me, you know,” Peter tells him, “I don’t judge.”

Derek’s smile is fake and conciliatory. He plugs in the other earbud and lopes down the path to the preserve and it’s trails. Whatever is chewing up Derek he doesn’t want to share.

With his cigarette finished Peter stubs it out into the pot plant by the door, he’s probably not the first and is surprised that there isn’t a few gold tipped filters sticking out of the soil. Or maybe Talia only smokes at the office. He stretches out and rolls his shoulders, he has a can of febreze in the car so he doesn’t have to put up with the cigarette funk all day and when he unlocks the car he sprays himself liberally. He’s not looking forward to returning to Eichen.

Only yesterday Stiles had sprawled over his cot, one leg hanging off the edge and bare feet on the polished concrete floor, “you know what the worst part of all these drugs is,” it’s rhetorical, “it’s that you can’t jerk off, look at this, I’m at my prime,” he tugged up his grey sweat to show the dark line of his pubic hair leading from his navel down under his low slung Eichen issued sweats, “and I’d get blisters before I even get hard, I can’t even jerk off because I’m bored, do you know what that’s like?” He had fixed Peter with those eyes, “and there’s no way they’re even going to give me a single use packet to finger myself, and if I ask they just sigh and give me more drugs. I had the strangest dream yesterday,” he never waits for Peter to interrupt him and that was no different. “Do you play go?” he changed the conversation like turning a page. “I’m bored and Gabriel just tells me to shut up, I was only singing, it passes the time, Bang bang bang on the door baby! Knock a little louder baby!

Bang bang bang on the door baby! I can't hear you, Bang bang bang on the door baby!” As he tunelessly sang, Peter’s blood ran cold but he didn’t stop him. “Knock a little louder sugar! Bang bang bang on the door baby! On the door baby, bang bang! On the door, bang bang! on the door baby, bang bang!”

Peter is not scared of Stiles, not like Marin is, but he does unsettle him, and that might be worse.

  
\---

 

In horror movies Eichen House would be a monstrous place of Gothic spires and dark shadows. There would be a bell tower and a belfry, and dead trees stretching their fingerlike dead branches towards the shuttered windows. There would be a sign warning drivers about escaped inmates and maybe Batman would be watching from the town. 

In reality it’s an open space with an Art Deco facade on a Victorian Spanish mesa that over the years has sprawled like a sea monster over the land. It is flanked by the preserve on one side and has wide sports fields on the other, and right now a group of teens is playing a game of soccer enjoying the last of the summer sun. He can hear their hubbub through the rolled down windows of the car as Joan Armatrading asks “ And make someone else some kind of unknowing fool, You make me stay when I should not, Are you so strong or is all the weakness in me”

Peter hated this building before he came back.

It smells of antiseptic and rubber soled shoes, and lacks personality despite the left overs of Artemis Eichen’s determination that the place be beautiful with stained glass windows and carved finials. 

He swipes his key card to go into the administration office, a nurse nodding a hello as he pulls on his lanyard and hooks the keys into his belt. Even those won’t get him into the special ward. For that he needs Brunski who holds one of three keys, Fenris, the chief of this place or Marin, and she makes a point to avoid him before the meetings. He could call for any of them but he wants to walk for a minute.

Years of government service have taken their toll on Eichen, painting the walls a sort of dusky mint green and the old slate tiles covered in linoleum, the wooden cupboards that were once used to hold personal effects are locked tight and the door to the basement looks new, the paint fresher than that around it, a heavy metal one that wasn’t there when Peter worked here before. 

Brunski is a piece of work. 

Peter read once that people with bullying personalities will find themselves attracted to jobs that reinforce the ideal of masculine dominance and Brunski certainly did. He has a sneer and a dismissive attitude to all of the patients, causing them to scatter out of his way like pigeons, and his white looks brighter, sharper than the others. He has the gait of a man used to making himself small and doesn’t know how not to hunch in this place where he has made himself king. Peter can’t stand him. He brags about the things he does. When a patient needs quiet time Brunski is the one they call.

Peter wonders what Stiles makes of him, Stiles who took one look at Schrader and bit off two of his fingers. Then the thought is gone as Brunski talks leading him down to the special ward as if Peter is new here. Don’t look into the cages, he says with a laugh, wouldn’t want to lose a hand.

The metal doors of the near side rattle as if bodies throw themselves against them when they hear Brunski speak.

Peter has never felt the urge to open the hatch on the doors and look inside. 

Some secrets Eichen House can keep for itself.

Artemis Eichen built the house in 1912 for his sister after she was struck with dementia but there are stories about the old man, and as he approaches Stiles’ cell with that eerie prescience of his he seems to know what Peter was thinking.

“Artemis Eichen built a house and taught his sister to hide

He opened the doors and windows too and let the monsters inside

Upstairs downstairs left and right she ran for over a mile”

Peter cuts him off, he doesn’t need to be reminded of how the rhyme ends. _He slit her throat from ear to ear and gave her a pretty smile._

That’s the least of what happened, Peter thinks. Artemis Eichen opened the house in 1912 because his sister was killed in a nearby institution, Artemis himself wanted only the mildest of patients, those that needed a safe space for a short while. Within a year he had lost control of the institute, two years later he was committed when they found him wearing his wife’s wedding dress screaming that the monster take him too, that it had to take him too. There was enough blood on the scene for them to decide he had killed his wife and child and he needed care. By 1920 he was in the special ward where he found a way to drill into his own head using nothing but a spoon. He painted on the walls of his cell with his own brain matter and spent the rest of his short life sedated and as a body for the doctors to perform electro-shock therapy in the hope that they could help him.

His cell was one of those locked on this floor. 

Strange how the rhyme always remembered the sister and not the murdered wife. It was probably because of the sign outside the door that read “providing for those without hope.”

Peter smiles at Stiles, sitting up today, cross legged on the floor in a lotus position with one of his pillows wedged under his hips. “And how are we today?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone is interested I'll put together a list of which songs are in which chapter, there is a spotify playlist but it's for me to work to and would be annoying to anyone else because it has songs which MIGHT be in the fic
> 
> this chapter was "Fast Car" By Tracy Chapman, "Love shack" by the B52s and "Weakness in me" by Joan Armatrading


	5. Chapter 5

Since returning to Beacon Hills Peter’s dreams have been weird. When he met with Elena Finch she had given him that tight brittle smile and said “it's Beacon Hills” as if it was explanation enough and maybe it was.

Small towns were strange to big city folk. It was the start of a hundred horror novels.

There is a Gothic sensibility to returning to the small town in which you were born and finding it smaller and run down in ways you never would have noticed, even if it was exactly the same without the ravages of time and growth.

Peter’s apartment in Portland is large and spare. He has mismatched furniture because he buys things as he needs them, choosing them as much for function as form. He has a teal velvet couch that Talia has told him is wasteful, too big and soft for one person alone. He has a cupboard of board games he uses with patients. The kitchen is full of devices to make cooking easier that he never uses. An expensive espresso machine dominates one wall. He takes more care of his wardrobe than his home. It is clean but looks unlived in. Even his work space, with it’s powerful desktop PC and laptop is clear of clutter other than a mug that Cora made for him which is full of pens and has a clumsy painting of a dog on it.

In contrast the Stilinski house is a hoarder’s paradise. It is clean and tidy but knickknacks and dog eared novels cover every surface. The kitchen cabinets are worn and the veneer pulled up at some corners. A plastic target coffee maker, not unlike his nephew’s, burbles away merrily in the corner. The fridge makes an unpleasantly loud hum. The couch is worn almost down to the weave in places and there are shoes peeking out from under the coffee table. It looks lived in, it looks like a home. The sheriff’s gun safe is in his bedroom and Peter notices that it is always kept locked, even without Stiles in the house.

The decor looks ten years out of date at least and the carpet leading into Stiles’ bedroom is scuffed bare. There are no images of his mother anywhere in the house, but given permission to root around in Stiles’ room he finds a woman's sweater folded up in the drawers. It's an ugly thing, baby pink with a white knitted bow pattern, machine made and the sleeves are uneven from not taking the care to dry it properly, but it smells like Charlie Red even now. Peter goes down to the kitchen and gets a ziploc bag from the drawer, carefully putting the sweater inside before he puts it back in the drawer. He knows how important things like this are so even though it means nothing to him he takes care with it.

Claudia Stilinski died in hospital after a brief battle with dementia. At the same time Stiles was admitted to hospital twice for stitches and the records note that his mother, unaware of who he was, would suddenly attack him. She thought he was trying to kill her and was determined to kill him first. She tried to drown him and he was only saved when the sheriff stopped her. Such incidents leave scars thicker than skin deep. Stiles probably knows, intellectually, that she was unwell, that it was her illness speaking and lashing out, but he was still a child who wanted his mother’s approval.

Claudia took the opportunity in hospital to kill herself. She walked from the roof of Beacon Memorial Hospital, leaving Stiles behind with a broken arm.

And still he honors trinkets of his mother.

His laptop sits on his desk at the foot of his bed. It is password protected. Peter smiles, he didn't think it would be that easy. His phone is on the desk too. The screen is smashed.

The bookcase contains what you would expect of a kid his age, a range of Percy Jackson books and a stone gargoyle, there is a chess set laid out mid game, but there is a post it note twisted around one of the pawns that reads Aiden.

Seeing that he looks closer, the post it note on the black king is gone, torn away but stuck to the base of the queen it reads Lydia.

It gives Peter the germ of an idea, one that will propagate and grow until he sees the boy next.

Stiles Stilinski is smart. He has enough credits to take his SATs now and graduate early. He is reading Dune for fun, because it sits on his bedside cabinet. He plays chess and World of Warcraft. He listens to a broad array of music and has DVDs filling one shelf of his bookcase, films like Excalibur and The Last Unicorn sit next to Batman Begins and Alien. His range is eclectic.

On the floor by his bed, almost covered by the rug there, is a copy of “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad and when Peter flicks through it it’s highlighted and marked with notes. Under his breath he talks about the choice to teach kids that book, not because it’s not a classic, it is, but because it’s toxic. It’s a book about a particular kind of madness. The thought turns then to the film adaptation and whether he’s seen that, but he’s not wheeling the old cathode ray tube TV from Eichen down to his cell to show him Apocalypse Now.

He pockets the book, you can learn a lot about someone by what they find important. Stiles has crammed all manner of notes into the margins of the book.

His cork board Peter left till last. There is a map of Beacon Hills marked with landmarks and wavy orange lines. There are pins at certain intersections. There is a print photo out of a tree that looked like it would better belongs in the Blair Witch Project, in his careful hand Stiles has added “hanging tree?”. There is a phone number that Peter programs into his own phone to check later and be baffled why Stiles has the number of the local vet. There are photos, they look like DMV headshots. A lunar calendar hangs from one tack at the frame but his daily calendar has a lot of standing appointments that have been scrubbed out with an eraser. The only ones that remain are “Music lesson with D” which has no other information.

Stiles has time, Peter sees and is what looks to be quite lonely. The books are well read, the DVDs ramshackle on their shelf, even the game system is on standby but the second controller is on the hook he has for it. He has a father who works a long and demanding job and the sheriff said that he made time for his son when he could, sharing his breaks with him in the cruiser. Stiles’ best friend, who hasn't made an attempt to visit him at Eichen, is a kid called Scott and it’s mostly the appointments made with him that are rubbed out of the calendar.

There is a photo of Lydia printed out on the wall, a selfie where she is making what they call duck face to make herself look prettier. She has an old 1950’s glam about her. The Asian girl in the photo with her must be Kira Yukimura, who the sheriff said had recently joined their group. When he takes down the photo to see if Stiles has named the third girl in the group he has a start when he sees it’s Allison Argent. She’s prettier than her aunt was.

Peter had not known that the Argents were in town.

That changes things.

Seven years ago Kate Argent had tried to burn down the Hale house in a New Years celebration where there were fifteen people inside. It was luck that she was stopped. The charges of attempted arson didn't stick but she has kept her head down in California since.

It's something Peter is going to have to ask his sister about.

—-

Talia Hale serves as the mayor of Beacon Hills. She ran for office just after the aborted arson attempt and won in a landslide. Peter has always thought that she was beautiful, with an oval face and strong features and the same dark hair. She has a strong jaw and a don’t fuck with me attitude that she manages despite her floaty wrap around dresses and strappy heeled sandals with their scarlet soles.

She is a mother of three and still makes grown men stop in the grocery store just to look, as if they can't believe she is real and standing in front of them inspecting produce like a real woman.

She makes people stop and stare and carries power like a wrathful goddess.

She looks up from her iPad, an expensive gift from Peter that she swore she had no use for and would probably be a useless paperweight, and raises an eyebrow before she asks “yes?”

Swallowing, he asks the question that has been on his mind all day “have you seen the go board?”

She tilts her perfect head, her perfect hair catching the light just so. Peter has always feared and hated his sister in equal measure, but it is a futile hate, like hating one of the great old ones that doesn't even know you exist.

“If it’s not in the attic I don’t know," she answers going back to her iPad, she could be reading anything on there, from those romantic novels with supernatural creatures that his colleagues call Snarlequins to regency romances to “Heart of Darkness”.

Peter had offered Derek one of the tablets to use to read books on, but Derek insisted he liked the tactile sensation of a book in his hand, and he’d already paid full price for his books, he didn't see the point of paying full price for a second copy. He could only read one copy at a time, after all, and, he added with a smile, there is a joy in giving someone a book you loved and you can't do that with an ipad.

“I’ll look there then," Peter says and goes to leave her presence.

“Why do you want it?” Talia asks, “you haven't been interested in go since,” she pauses, “since before you left. Satomi has said that she missed your games but with you in Portland.” She leaves it open, as if the long drive is the only reason she allows him to not return for what had been a weekly appointment.

He had enjoyed playing Go with the old woman. Satomi lived one town over but she and Talia met for tea, and when she saw that Peter played go she asked if she could join him. The two of them would drink imported whiskey with the brand name “Glen Fujiyama” which had made them both laugh. She had taught him Japanese as they played, rewarding him with expensive matcha tea, that she had imported, when he won the game.

There had been a cheap liquor, at $5 a liter, brightly colored chemical nastiness that advertised itself as fruit flavored but despite the label, tasted of green and anti freeze, that they drank as forfeits when they were at her house, ceding dignity with territory. His visits to Satomi’s were among the highlights of a miserably average adolescence.

Twenty years later and the artificial green taste still floods his mouth with the memory.

“I thought it might help in Eichen,” Peter says, trying to leave the terrible gravity of Talia’s presence. “I often play board games with my patients.” That is true, he has an ongoing game of Gloomhaven with several of his patients in in-patient care. The game was expensive but it’s worth it for the joy it gives them. They experience everything so fully when it doesn’t matter outside of the game. He’s teaching them to take up space, to believe that they deserve to take time, or in one case, to let others take their turn, to work in concert.

He can’t use a collaborative game with Stiles. He doesn’t know what the chessboard in Stiles’ room means but he does know that it rules the game out.

“If you can't find it,” Talia says, dismissive, “let me know, I’ll ask Satomi if she has a spare.” And like that he is dismissed, the old god turns its attention back to its amusements and the ant is left to quarrel with the boot.


End file.
